May 23, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



481 



The development of the museum during the 

 next five years in preparation for its golden 

 jubilee wiU, it is hoped, include three great 

 features, namely, extension of building, firm 

 foundation of popular municipal maintenance, 

 and increase of the general or unrestricted 

 endowment fund to $5,000,000, the amount 

 needed to place the museum on a financially 

 sure foundation for the coming quarter of a 

 century. Henry FAmriELD Osborn 



HERBERT HUNTINGTON SMITH 



The wide circle of his friends and acquaint- 

 ances were shocked to read in the daily jour- 

 nals that on March 22 Mr. Herbert Himt- 

 ington Smith, the curator of the Alabama 

 Museum, had been killed by being run over by 

 a freight train. In recent years he had be- 

 come very deaf, and it was owing to this 

 infirmity that he came to his vmtimely end. 

 Once before, in the city of Pittsburgh, he had 

 been struck by an electric car, the approach of 

 ■which he had not observed, but fortunately 

 escaped at that time, with only a few bruises. 



A nvunber of years ago Lord Walsingham in 

 an address before the Entomological Society 

 of London in speaking of the work of field 

 naturalists and the additions made by them 

 to the sum of human knowledge, made the 

 statement that the two ablest collectors were 

 Americans, one of them the late William H. 

 Doherty, the other Herbert Himtington Smith. 

 With both of these men the writer of these 

 lines was intimately associated, both of them 

 having made extensive collections for him in 

 foreigrn parts, and both came to their end 

 under tragic circimistances. Doherty died in 

 Uganda, as the result of nervous prostration 

 brought about partly by e.xposure, partly by 

 the fact that his camp was haunted by man- 

 eating lions, which had killed several of his 

 assistants. Smith passed away in the midst 

 of important activities, as the result of a 

 horrible accident. 



My acquaintance with Mr. Herbert Hunt- 

 ington Smith, which has covered nearly thirty 

 years of his life, enables me to speak of him 

 with an appreciation founded upon intimate 

 knowledge. 



He was bom at Manlius, New York, on 

 January 21, 1851. He studied at Cornell 

 University from 1868 to 1872. In 1870 he 

 accompanied his friend and teacher, the late 

 Professor C. F. Hartt, on an excursion to the 

 Amazons. He thus caught his first glimpse of 

 tropical life, which wove about him a spell 

 which always thereafter bound him. 



In 1874 he returned to Brazil for the pur- 

 pose of collecting and studying the fauna of 

 the Amazonian regions. Two years were spent 

 in the neighborhood of Santarem, and subse- 

 quently he passed a year in explorations upon 

 tlie northern tributaries of the Amazons and 

 the Tapajos, after which he stayed about four 

 montlis in Rio de Janeiro. Returning to the 

 United States he was commissioned by the 

 Messrs. Scribner to write a series of articles 

 upon Brazil for their magazine, and accord- 

 ingly made two more trips to that country, 

 studying the industries, social and political 

 conditions, and investigating the famine dis- 

 trict in Ceara. On one of these journeys he 

 was accompanied by Mr. J. Wells Champney, 

 who was employed to prepare illustrations for 

 his articles. One of the results of these jour- 

 neys was the volume entitled " Brazil, the 

 Amazons and the Coast," which was issued by 

 Charles Scribner's Sons in 1879. On October 

 5, 1880, Mr. Smith married Miss Amelia Wool- 

 worth Smith, of Brooklyn, New York. She 

 entered with zest into his labors, and in all 

 the years which followed was his devoted and 

 most capable assistant. There was a remark- 

 able accord in their tastes and ilrs. Smith 

 developed unusual skill and efficiency in the 

 manipulative processes involved in collecting 

 specimens of natural history. Indeed, it is no 

 exaggeration to say that her learned husband 

 would not have been able to accomplish the 

 vast amount of work, which was achieved in 

 later years, had it not been for her facile 

 fingers. She became an accomplished taxi- 

 dermist, and was able to prepare the skins 

 of birds and preserve insects, in the most ap- 

 proved manner. Mr. Smith and his wife 

 spent the years from 1881 to 1886 in Brazil. 

 He made his general headquarters in Rio de 

 Janeiro, where he received much encourage- 



